


On Military Reactions to the Transcendence

by ParadoxPotentia



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Alternate Universe - Transcendence (Gravity Falls), But the writer is probably an unreliable narrator, Gen, Here's hoping I didn't ruin Wendigo too badly., Historical, Magical Girls, Military, That is not because of ignorance, The supernatural is actually dangerous, Wendigo, Worldbuilding, You'll note Alcor The Dreambender isn't a character tag, but that's it, he gets a chapter
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-11-30
Updated: 2018-12-02
Packaged: 2019-09-02 13:05:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 4,869
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16787521
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ParadoxPotentia/pseuds/ParadoxPotentia
Summary: A series of essays on the US military's reaction to the transcendence, including cultural context.





	1. Initial Reactions

**Author's Note:**

> I have no idea what the fuck I am doing.

When the Transcendence happened, the governments were all thrown into a panic, for obvious reasons. This was the biggest global change since the first nuclear bomb, and unlike that invention, it had immediate effects on everyone and everywhere.[1] Most of the government was flailing around like their heads were cut off- politically, were ghosts and gnomes granted the same protection as humans, or were they not? Should they be further restricted, or only bound by the same laws as humanity? These debates have been covered in great depth, and no doubt will be covered again. They only came to semi-satisfactory conclusions over a hundred years later, and even now we perpetually rehash these points. It was decades before any government developed a consistent supernatural policy. However, at least in America, there was one major exception: The military. The military was thrown into panicked flailing too, but the military’s flailing was much more active. They focused on fighting off or fighting with the supernatural.

[1] Yes, there were exceptions, places that either already had been “Transcended” - such as Gravity Falls- or places that weren’t directly affected by the transcendence, and only saw the effects from a distance.

Many of the battles against the supernatural were disasters. In fact, it would be unfair to call them witch hunts, slaughters, or massacres- primarily due to the prices the government paid. Most approximations imply that there were more military casualties- and more military fatalities, though those numbers are far more nebulous- than there were supernatural fatalities.

Anyone trying to cast this as the big bad government trying to slaughter the harmless, innocent, preternatural creatures will quickly find themselves proven wrong on at least one of the counts.[2] Not every target was a justified one, but some of them have track records of manslaughter today, or are deemed unsafe to deal with. Yes, many dragons were very civilized and didn’t deserve men in tanks coming to their doors- but the usual cost of taking down a dragon was approximately three tanks and at least six casualties, and that was after they got dragonslaying down to a science. Meanwhile, they also picked fights with creatures that were actively slaughtering humans- yes, for the most part the preternatural was either peaceful, restrained or distant from society, but quite a few actively malevolent entities appeared in towns. A few such entities were even capable of destroying said towns, with their primitive knowledge of magic.

[2] You should note that these slaughters did happen, but were almost always enacted by local police forces, militias, or simple individual civilians. No military kill-chambers for gnomes, for instance, have ever existed.

The military had the decency to prioritize the biggest threats first, which led to their first fight being one that definitely set several dangerous precedents. A minor city in Alaska had Wendigo appear shortly post transcendence. Now, these Wendigo did what most wild Wendigo do, and slaughtered people as best they could.[3]

[3] I am aware that Wendigo in these days have been civilized and socialized and many spend their lives productively, but this is a relatively new development, and even so, a Wendigo who has not grown up in human society is much more likely to not get why murder is wrong than most species.

Fortunately, the city only had a few Wendigo. Unfortunately, they had no good documentation on how to deal with Wendigo, and as a result, the death count was massive. The accounts depict the city as being covered in ice and every Wendigo having a massive aura of frost and death around them. Of course, most of this comes from frontline soldiers, most of whom were seriously traumatized by the ordeal- we don’t actually know if the blizzard was a coincidence or a consequence of a Wendigo feasting on an unprecedented and hopefully never-matched level. Either way, the military brought flamethrowers and other non-standard fire weapons, including multiple fire-aligned instances of the Prometheus Heist[4] and a wide selection of incendiaries.

[4] I could write an entire paper on this, but suffice to say they’re better known as “magical girls” these days. This isn’t the only codeword Prometheus Heist went by, but there was no elemental division or separation of operations. It was simply a nested cover.

There are numerous requisition forms for these items on documentation, the tone of most implying that they had simply assumed that any ice-aligned creature would be vulnerable to fire. Fortunately for them, this time that assumption would prove correct. They would later learn the hard way exactly how unreliable such an assumption would be.

Despite this, at least twelve troopers were consumed by the group of Wendigo. Still, the city-killing Wendigo were brought down with an almost negligible number of soldier casualties, at least when compared to the numerous civilian fatalities. Tragically, over half the city was either directly killed by the Wendigo or died in the blizzard. The fatalities gave the military leverage to pursue further conflict with the supernatural, starting with a campaign of extermination against the Wendigo.

While there was pressure to resolve things peacefully, there is no peaceful resolution with the Wendigo. From what we know of their culture and the curse that powered them, they were incapable of choosing to not kill. The military tried on numerous occasions with ones without body counts, and it usually ended in a near death, including numerous cunning attempts to kill the soldiers involved first.

Again, Wendigo were not nice magical creatures. It took several different modifications on their curse and active socialization to generate anything even vaguely resembling the Wendigo in our society today, and even so, the first “cured” Wendigo were still only suited for work as a CEO.[5] While we perhaps should not cheer for the complete eradication of the North American Wendigo, it’s still entirely fair to not mourn it either.

[5] This may have been a joke in bad taste, but the sociopathy, overwhelming lack of empathy, and desire to eat any sentient species they see are all in the same psychological documentation. In addition, the tone of the paper makes me suspect they may have been serious about the Wendigo’s aptitude for CEO positions.

Eventually, though, every Wendigo they could find was slain, and the US military turned their sights to other threats. Well, if we’re being completely factual these didn’t happen in quite that order, but for the sake of a good story let’s simplify and say they did, rather than the fact that it took them another thirty years to wipe out all Wendigo, and they turned their attention to other threats around two years in- by which point they proudly boasted they could kill a Wendigo with an average of one fatality.

From that point on, they began to deal with other supernatural creatures. Most of them they didn’t wage wars of extinction on- having had cases of positive relations with them, and/or they were proven manageable by local forces, at least until the bigger threats were dealt with. Unfortunately, there were two major exceptions: Dragons, which were capable of taking on a city on their own- and ghosts, which were nigh-impossible to kill. Both of these, the government tended to see with the same brush as the Wendigo- all the same, and all dangerous.

To be fair, in the case of Ghosts it was vaguely justified anyways- a ghost high-profile enough to draw government attention would tend to have major grudges, and therefore be a major threat to somebody. But in the case of dragons it was largely unjustified, and lead to much greater tensions between dragons and humanity than there would otherwise have been. On the other hand, it’s arguable that the military taking down dragons is what made dragonkind actually respect humanity as a threat rather than a useful tool- but whether that is a good thing is up for debate.


	2. Prometheus Heist

Let’s talk about the military’s attempts to weaponize the supernatural as well. One of their first productive attempts was the Prometheus Heist. Now, on paper- and as I offhandedly mentioned last time- it was about weaponizing magical girls. However, it wasn’t as narrowly defined as modern magical girls are. While the majority were “true” magical girls, drawing magic from ideals and relationships and using it on an instinctual level- quite a few entities within were not magical girls, or not human at all.

If a species could appear fully human, and had visible magic, one of its kind probably wound up under the program’s umbrella. Selkies, shapeshifting varieties of dragons, changelings and human practitioners of magic all wound up being treated the same as the magical girls by the program, at the time.

This one size fits all policy led to issues with understanding the true nature of their charges. Despite selkies being public knowledge- albeit hard to find concrete information on- almost none of the selkies the program acquired were ever identified as being such. Whether this was willful ignorance or genuine naivete is entirely up for debate. Regardless, they assumed control over far more than their official domain.

It should be noted- while there is often controversy about the child soldiers they used, at the time they tried to make the practice as ethical as possible while dealing with magical superweapons in human form. While enrolling in the program was often compulsory after even a relatively minor magical mishap- in some cases completely harmless incidents with under a hundred dollars in property damage- the program and actual military operations were separate things.

The program focused on training the individuals’ control, versatility and power, whether for use in war or peace, and roughly eighty percent of the individuals within the program never signed on with any military power at any point in their lives. It was implemented as a boarding school for the children with parents, legal guardians or family, allowing them to return to their families on a regular basis as well as visitation.

Still, there was a certain amount of unintentional pressure on the children involved to use their powers for the military, and many of the magical girls needed no pressure regardless. There is, after all, a certain psychological trend where Magical girls are involved, where they are willing to fight, die and bleed for their beliefs. This translates very naturally into the same attitudes the military at those times had- a very internal defense focused force. On top of this, due to loopholes in legislation designed to support those members of the preternatural who came of age sooner than humanity, magical girls qualified, allowing them to enlist as young as thirteen. Many did, most without their parents’ approval or even knowledge.

Unlike many of their other programs, this one was a success- both in keeping magical girls off the streets where they could be seriously dangerous, and in keeping them in a position to defend humanity. On the other hand, it was not that useful for learning to enhance their powers, and while their control over said powers did increase as a direct result of the program, it was not nearly as effective as today’s training, while being far more expensive. In addition, the unrealistic dream-outcome of the program was not successful either- the military did not figure out how to produce magical girls at will.

The use of underage magical girls persisted for decades, with under a hundred magical girl fatalities for the duration of the practice- which was a large part of how the government justified it to themselves. It was, after all, really hard for the military to resist the temptation of soldiers who could almost match a dragon in power while they were all-but-warring with dragons on a daily basis. Especially when the alternative was often bloody, with far higher death counts. We can condemn them from where we stand, with relative peace between humanity and the preternatural. But they didn’t have adult magical girls for most of that time, and those they had were dulled by cynicism and despair. They didn’t have dragons that truly respected the law- some may have been friendly with humanity and law-abiding, but they certainly wouldn’t have helped enforce it for the sake of a few humans. They didn’t have any of the knowledge that allows us to keep the peace without betraying our ethics today, and none of the powerful creatures integrated into our society today really cared about humanity as a whole back then- most cared only for those they knew personally.

In the end, the use of magical girls was a metaphorical deal with the devil, trading away ethics for the sake of saving lives- but for every family who cursed that choice, there are ten more that only live today because of that choice. Unlike most of the military’s disastrous projects, this one worked- the only problem with it was that it wasn’t right.

You can condemn them for it all you like- I know some of them did. But it was a sin of desperation, not one of greed or fear. After all, they’d seen what the supernatural could do- and the government can’t protect what it can’t match. I don’t doubt humanity would be here even if they hadn’t done it- but I’m sure they didn’t know that.

This is the project I’ll be most positive about, mostly because most of the others were dramatically more foolish, worse implemented, or less wise- without being any more ethical. The werewolf soldiers, the demon summonings, the demon bindings, the attempts to weaponize angels, the vampire negotiations- point is, this is the good end of the spectrum, as their projects and contingencies went.

That child soldiers was the good end of the spectrum is a sign of how badly things were going, I think.


	3. The Ghost Problem

I kind of hammered on how dangerous the dragons were in the last article, because they’re one of the most dangerous species today, and so you would respect my point. But the fact of the matter was, in those days a ghost would usually give the military more trouble. Partially, this is because the military would be involved with some of the most potent ghosts- if it hadn’t hurt or killed anyone they probably would decide they had more dangerous things to deal with first.

This led to a skew towards the military picking fights with vengeful ghosts, for the most part. Some vengeful ghosts were simply impossible to kill, or nearly so, while capable of killing people in their domain with some difficulty. Others, however, had worse things to offer than that. A certain vengeful spirit variety could cause anyone it killed to also become a vengeful spirit, leading to the loss of that city for decades before advances in exorcisms finally made recovery plausible.

This was made worse by the requirements for harming a ghost- or the lack of consistency thereof. While modern exorcisms work almost universally- with the catch that more potent rituals may be needed for exceptionally powerful ghosts- the world hadn’t gotten exorcisms even down to an art yet, much less down to a science.

It is worth noting that what we consider to be a modern exorcism spell generally involves elements from over twenty different banishing rites, stacked redundantly to ensure that no ghost turns out to have been immune. In any given exorcism, less than four of these rites are actually having an effect. It is traditional, now, to design exorcisms that have an effect on all known ghost types, so that exorcists don’t have to identify the ghost type before being able to defend against it. Even so, roughly one ghost in twenty winds up immune anyways.

But back then, ghost-slaying was a field in its infancy, and the lack of consistency made banishing impractical, while any other kind of attack tended to struggle against ghosts. There were a few exceptions, but none of those could be mass produced, and they all depended on people or were specific to that ghost. To make matters worse, we hadn’t figured out how to emulate effects without actually having them. 

I won’t go into the details, but suffice to say that ghosts defeated the military more than the rest of the supernatural put together, in that the military usually couldn’t go “it was a partial victory” or “at least we drove them off”. No, losses against ghosts were stupid and pointless and achieved nothing.

But they were the military, and so they kept trying. That said, after around three years, the military finally wised up, with fewer than a 5% success rate to show for their endeavors. They realized that most ghosts- especially the ones capable of slaying people- couldn’t travel independently. After that, the practice began to be far more subdued affairs, preceded by completely blocking off the area. Meanwhile, they continued to desperately search for acceptable ways to kill them.[1]

[1] The methods that worked reliably included demon deals- but no demon provided sufficient information to approach universal ghost dispelling. Other methods- like setting a meaner ghost on a less mean one- worked but certainly didn’t actually solve these kinds of problems. In general, there was a frantic push into exorcism research that really didn’t pan out all that much. Some of those experiments were incredibly unethical, but that was more due to oversight failure than actual pressure into finding more unacceptable methods.

After all, if they kept the public away from the ghost, it would be harmless. This course of action actually worked, except for rare issues with actually keeping people out. Still, that was something the military actually had experience with, so it was far more effective than trying to kill ghosts. 

The only exception was true ghosts- those that were capable of sentience, growing, and changing. Many of these wound up emotionally bonding with- and then hitching rides elsewhere on- the guards.[2] The guards might never notice the bonding, and would continue ineffectively guarding a no-longer-haunted location. These were incredibly rare as vengeful ghosts went, but fortunately most of them had already satisfied their grudge, or else grown beyond it.

A few still were murderous or had their share of grudges, which led to further problems, but in order to escape they needed to at least care about their own host as a person. As with true ghosts even today, they couldn’t travel without a substantial emotional attachment to the object, and the military almost immediately implemented a “don’t remove anything” policy. The military spent the following years struggling to figure out how to contain wandering ghosts, but it was a much smaller and rare problem than dealing with every vengeful ghost in the country.

[2] More specifically, this is a process called “Anchoring”. A ghost can attach their afterlife to anything they cared sufficiently about, and hypothetically even jump between Anchors. But they need intense positive emotion for an anchor to be a viable connection, so it was rarely a problem.

Still, the key thing to keep in mind is this- it took decades before the military could consistently kill ghosts. In other words, this was all defense and distraction. Arguably, the United States were therefore successfully invaded by a hostile force for around forty years in which all they could do was mitigate the harm caused by ghosts. That is a good perspective to take when you look at their actions when dealing with them.

It doesn’t justify the things that some research branches did in desperation, but in general they dealt with it as competently as was feasible.


	4. On Alcor and on governmental demonology

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> On Alcor, with ramblings on government demonology programs in general.

I have been asked about Alcor, and what the US did with him and demons in general. Well, let’s start with the obvious- they tried to bind him. 

It was part of a project that worked on binding demons- one that ended disastrously a few months later, but left behind good notes that enabled them to re-enact the bindings elsewhere. Still, there was an urgent alert about Alcor after he broke the bindings, but- since he didn’t pursue revenge, and the military had other fires to put out, they mostly ignored him. 

There were a few summonings, but none were authorized and all were covered up. For the larger part, the military didn’t have the resources to go after him again- even if they were that foolish- nor the foolishness to try to make a working arrangement with a demon, much less a demon with a potential grudge.

There were a few secret projects to bind Alcor- but all of them were kept solely as a last resort. After the California tragedy, it was obvious that trying to bind Alcor was a nuclear option, and they were very lucky to have gotten away with it. The cost of a failed binding was unsure, but every estimate agreed- it was too much. The military might have been foolish enough to dabble in werewolves and diabolism and a thousand more dangerous things- but all of those things seemed safer than picking a fight with Alcor. Given that Alcor has been recorded as taking a planet as payment for an agreement with the government and eating it- I believe their threat assessments were accurate.

With demons in general- the government tried to deal with them, tried to bind them, and tried to study them. Due to the tendencies of these projects to end catastrophically, they were generally kept isolated from humanity, under wraps, and performed regular data backups to an offsite database. Most of these projects had only a few dozen people assigned to them, working on a very specific goal. Studying a single bound demon, or binding a specific demon, or making deals with demons for information on other demons. Larger, purely conceptual projects, were also common, usually with people who had survived several smaller projects and were trusted not to take unwise initiative. 

On the same note, there were a few such projects that were just waiting and researching until deals were needed, and then would be set to work on making a deal as quickly and cheaply as possible when emergencies hit.

All of these were regarded with a general air of distrust in the larger military, as being barely better than a cult. California made it clear to everyone in the administration, if not the people working on the projects, that direct demon intervention was to be used only in situations where the next best alternative was nuclear bombing. Still, demons could provide resources or knowledge, and often deals were made with demons for both. 

This led to the common limitations of demon deals for knowledge being a problem. The thing is, demons aren’t creative, as a rule. Even demons with limited omniscience could only answer how a thing is done, or has been done, or how it works. Insofar as I am aware, there are no demons that can and will provide knowledge of how to build a thing humanity hasn’t already figured out.[1] To make matters worse, demons need very specific questions- and demon prices rise dramatically if you make them wait longer than their patience can stand. 

[1] Alcor is a likely exception, which would demonstrate other exceptions exist- but Alcor is demonstrably and undeniably more interested in humanity than any other demon ever recorded, while having power greater than all other demons- probably even if you put them all together. It’s entirely plausible that his omnipotence has transcended those limitations, or else he simply has more interest than any other.

Besides that, nearly every demon will provide as little information as they can. After all, that means more deals for them, and they have an obsessive need to be making as much profit in a deal as possible. Deals attempting to get around this usually wind up with the demon playing monkey’s paw, either from malice or genuine interpretation of the contract as written. If you request “complete understanding of the mechanics on which ghosts work”, the demon will stuff that information into your head carelessly. I know this, because that is what the demon- one noted for their patience and cooperativeness compared to the others- did. The victim did not survive. With books, they received more summarized knowledge at exorbitant prices, but the demon had no ability to judge what was or wasn’t important, leading to incomplete solutions.

These days, it is believed knowledge demons who try to keep up regular deals do knowledge transfers, taking knowledge derived from a human and moving it to another’s brain, even if they hide the fact. Duplicating knowledge is doubtless easy in the mindscape, and it’s much easier to import knowledge that has already been formatted for physical brains safely than to import knowledge from a demon’s mind. But in order for that to work in any way, you need to have a knowledge base to siphon off of- knowledge demons offer lost knowledge from humans long dead, secret knowledge, and accelerated learning. 

Still, these projects had absurd fatality rates- it’s estimated that for every one project team that survived a year, nine died horribly in one way or another. The reason it’s only estimations is because the projects were hidden so well that even today new ones are being discovered. The ones that ended in slaughters and the ones that were successful were both covered up as much as possible, and were often mistaken for cult activity on top of that.

For what it’s worth- the military did not deal in involuntary human sacrifice, and official policy forbid ever selling your soul. There probably were souls sold. There definitely were volunteers to be the human sacrifices, so it wouldn’t be surprising if there were people who took that to the next level.

As for the military’s opinion on Gravity Falls- for the most part they tried to avoid it. Once Alcor was discovered there, higher-ups desperately justified ignoring it to themselves. Either there was no crisis, because Alcor was actually as benevolent towards the area as he seemed- or there was a crisis they could only escalate, not win. By the time they discovered- or perhaps, admitted- it was more than an urban legend, the California incident had reminded them there were things humanity still couldn’t threaten lurking in the dark. They abandoned it to Alcor’s whims, and if Alcor had slaughtered every soul within it probably would have still only resulted in them putting a little more planning into a binding circle. 

They weighed the lives of the small town versus the risk to everyone else if they failed to take down Alcor- and decided not to roll the dice. Given that there has been no documented successful binding of Alcor to date, I feel that it was the right call. Still, you can find a lot of guilt in personal diaries, journals, and even in the report itself.

In short, the military’s opinion on Alcor was “Don’t fight him, it’s not worth the risk”. 

Of course, that leaves the issue of “how did the military deal with hostile demons and with cults?”. I feel that is better left separate from how they used demons and how they dealt with Alcor- who probably should be considered a separate entity anyways. Still, one thing worth noting- nearly every covered-up deal with Alcor was a commission to eliminate a crisis that was worth risking another California. Most of those involved other demons.

A situation worth risking a California sounds like a situation where a California is imminent without Alcor involved.[2] 

[2] I mean, we know that kind of devastation isn’t possible with today’s demons[3], but it’s been over a century since Alcor became undeniably the strongest demon- it’s entirely likely that Alcor simply consumed any demons capable of operating on that scale to increase his own power. Even besides the greed option- always plausible, even Alcor doesn’t do things for free...we know Alcor tends to kill demons who offended his sensibilities. Given the current theory on demon politics post-transcendence is that Alcor rapidly gathered power after the transcendence and was a young upstart before that- it seems plausible the greatest demons were devoured in the century following the transcendence.

It would also not surprise me if today’s demons are weaker because Alcor refuses to allow demons that can threaten such devastation to exist because they might be able to threaten him. Rumors exist that the California incident itself involved two demons, and while I’m not sure I believe them- the videos provided as evidence are always incredibly blurry and could easily be faked- it could provide an explanation both for why Alcor rampaged through California, and why he left any survivors at all.

[3] Modern demons are unwilling to do it at any price, which implies they are incapable. This has been documented in the documents that have been recently released regarding the most recent war. That said, given the above ramble- that might be an “I don’t want Alcor to know I can do that”, not an “I can’t do that”. It could also have been a “Mizar is there, we’re not risking killing her”, or even “Mizar might be there, and I’m not risking that”.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Not gonna do a lot with Alcor, and this is part of why. Alcor is a very personal entity, he doesn't get in with large organizations, and the military basically has had him on an escalating "do not disturb" list from the binding in early-canon in some fic.


End file.
